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Can You Tell an Up-and-Coming Neighborhood by Its ‘Emergent Energy’?

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Can You Tell an Up-and-Coming Neighborhood by Its ‘Emergent Energy’?

By Maya Lau September 26, 2013 5:22 pmSeptember 26, 2013 5:22 pm

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Jim Nelson's 2002 article about how restaurants can cause neighborhoods to shift.Credit Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times

In this weekend’s issue, Sam Sifton provides a recipe for a pork chops dish that used to be served at Relish, a now-shuttered diner in North Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and describes it as “a taste of Brooklyn on the cusp of its move into full food mania.” (The diner’s space, a silver-colored boxcar, is now occupied by La Esquina, a restaurant higher on the trendy scale.) The article calls to mind an earlier one from 2002, written by Jim Nelson and titled “Hip-ification.” Nelson, who is now the editor of GQ, examined the role that new restaurants play in a neighborhood’s mutation. Here’s how he characterized culinary newcomers to the Lower East Side during the late ’90s:

These players — you might call them early scouters — were a relatively small lot. In the months before the fall of 1999, a handful or so of people were looking at the neighborhood in a unique way, appraising its potential, sometimes without even knowing they were doing so. The scouters had a few things in common: many had run a shop or restaurant before in other, once-forsaken parts of the city. They liked being on the edge of things, being the first on the block and having others follow them. And, on a more subtle level, they were able to sense something — an emergent energy. It was almost subarticulate. “If you’d heard about the Lower East Side, you might think: Oh, no, not there,” says Juan Carlos Rodriguez, a Spaniard who began construction on his tapas bar, 1492 Food, just as the people across the street were building 71 Clinton. “But as soon as you went walking, you felt something. The street was very particular.”

Which New York neighborhoods have that sort of “emergent energy” today? And once those places morph into something more gentrified — spiffy restaurants and all — does that mean that they’ll go the way of North Williamsburg? Join the conversation in the comments section.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…